Uwe Tellkamp - The Tower

‘Not actually. But a scientist without a PhD, at a university—’

‘Yes. These are things that happen to people. But take comfort from me, my friend. I was only able to attend a few lectures at university and I’m only an honorary doctor. But I hope that I can say that despite that I have made something of myself, hmm? — Then you joined Insel Verlag?’

‘You are well informed, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘An experiment is only as good as its preparations.’ Arbogast twisted his lips. ‘Which is not to say that I regard you as an experiment. Yes, and now I remember — before Insel you were with Teubner’s, the scientific and academic publishers that also brought out my volumes of tables for electrophysics. You were a bit out of the firing line there, so to speak, but not far from your original field.’

He’ll have had his informants, Meno thought. B. G. Teubner, where I found work, Haube got me the position. A course at the Bibliographical Institute, evening classes. The bears at the entrance to the Zoological Institute … The light and the rooms come back into memory and if you see them again, they’ve become strange and have nothing to do with you any more — and yet they did belong to me, just as I belonged to them. The stockily built, bald Party Secretary of the Institute, in the conference room in Talstrasse; my mentor, who’s present at the summons; my fellow assistant, who has to take minutes and with whom I share a room in the student residence … The empty-looking pieces of furniture reflecting Haube’s idea of socialist functionality — he hated flourishes, hated the baroque, the Catholic Church, hated Vienna, where he had grown up and we didn’t know and of which he, a large illustrated book in his hand, would speak in a tone of revulsion, hacking at the black-and-white photos with his index finger, the Theresianum, the Ringstrasse, the Capuchin Vault, the Hofburg: that had been the breeding ground for Hitler and his gang — the shit-brown criminals, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no other word for it, you will have to get used to my strong language in this respect.

‘Your eye collection is very impressive, Herr von Arbogast.’

Write it down, Hanna had said, and then perhaps you can get it out of your system. Those years in the sixties when we were young in Leipzig and carried two cards round with us in our wallets: one with a number, that was the butter number you had to give in the shop to get some of the rationed butter — or not to get it when the ration had all been used up: there’s none left, Herr Rohde, but I can give you a bit of margarine; and the house fire basic card 1 , the coal card that you needed for your fuel allocation. — The Café Corso in Gewandgässchen, the decayed splendour of the cloth merchants, with its landlady who spoke in a Bavarian accent, its buffet on the first floor and sitting opposite it the fat ladies, who were worthy of a place in Heimito von Doderer’s Demons , the cream-cake-ladies as they were called; the hum of voices upstairs in the preserved Art Deco room: the sea-green fabric wallpaper behind which the Geiger counters ticked and the auriculate jellyfish listened, so people said; where, when the windows were open in the summer, the bellowing voice of the Regional Party Secretary was squeezed out of the pillars with the city radio loudspeakers; the Café Corso: Ernst Bloch would come and talk about Marxism; the university Rector, Mayer-Schorsch, with the fraternity duelling scars he was said to have acquired on the same duelling floor as Haube, would order half a dozen glasses of Hornano vermouth for himself, drink a toast to the goateed Chairman of the State Council on the wall, stand a round for his students and argue about Brecht with the principal of the Institute of Literature, while we at the tables at the front would whisper about Sartre and Anouilh, Beckett, the poems of Yevtushenko and Okudzhava till our heads were spinning; to get that out of my system –

Arbogast had been playing with one of the pencils and staring pensively out of the window. Giving Meno, who was sitting slumped in his chair, a brief glance, he said, ‘Well, Rohde, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I’m writing my autobiography. Your publishing house has approached me, the book is something they’d like to see. What I need is a critical eye, an opponent I can take seriously … I read these pages to my family at weekends, they all nod, but I have the feeling this acceptance comes either from cluelessness or from a mistaken idea of love; perhaps they also want to spare my feelings … It could be that Trude is to a certain extent lacking in that respect … To put it in a nutshell: I need a partner. I’ve made enquiries about you, as I said, and you have an outstanding reputation.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘We’ll talk about this another time. Think it over carefully. Should you say no, you will be forfeiting a fee that would be, well, appropriate. If you say yes, you will have a large amount of work ahead of you, at an unusual hour now and then. I’ll call you tomorrow evening, at eight sixteen. Come in.’

‘The guests are arriving, Herr Baron.’

‘Thank you, Frau Alke.’ Arbogast picked up the gryphon walking stick and ushered Meno out of the room. They went down into the hall. Meno recognized Vogelstrom, who was talking to Dietzsch, a sculptor who was a neighbour of the Hoffmanns in Wolfstone, Lothar Däne, the music critic of the Sächsisches Tageblatt , the physicist Teerwagen in conversation with Dr Kühnast from the pharmaceutical factory, the dentist, Frau Knabe, who had the apartment above Krausewitz in Wolfstone. Her husband, who worked in the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments in the Zwinger, was standing with Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and a woman: Judith Schevola. Meno had heard rumours about her that were going round the literary scene and read a few remarkable stories by her in Sinn und Form … One of the most gifted young writers, she wrote with a passion that was rare in German literature. He had seen her a few times at meetings of the Writers’ Association, also at the Leipzig Fair, but had never spoken to her. She had grey, close-cropped hair, but seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties at the most. Everything about her face looked displaced and distorted, as if it had been put together out of many other faces. Only her eyes seemed to belong to her. She scrutinized Arbogast, then Meno, taking sips from a glass of pomegranate juice. The men were standing facing her, on the other side of the hall as well. Alke opened the door, letting in Sperber, the lawyer, Schiffner, the publisher, and a man with a slightly hunched walk and a fleshy lower lip hanging down, whom Meno knew all too well; he started back and grasped the banister, which the woman with grey hair seemed to register with simultaneous curiosity and hostility, then she looked up and followed Meno’s reactions; he thought: like an entomologist pulling a fly’s leg off to see how it will deal with the new situation. The man — who had noticed him and surreptitiously raised his arm — was Jochen Londoner, his ex-father-in-law.

‘Please make your way to our television room.’

‘One moment, Ludwig.’ Giving her husband a polite smile, Frau von Arbogast introduced Meno to the other guests. Judith Schevola’s greeting was brief: ‘We know each other. At the last Association conference you showed a great talent for falling asleep.’ Arbogast led the company to the door out of which Ritschel had emerged. Judith Schevola, Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and Frau Knabe, the dentist, stood looking at the painting over the dragon table and only came when Arbogast rang a little bell.

After his talk and the subsequent discussion, Meno went upstairs before the others; a buffet had been set up in the conference room. Alke and Ritschel were busy at the table with the white cloth. A youngish physicist, who had sat behind Arbogast during the talk, gave Meno a friendly nod. ‘If there’s anything else you’d like to see …’ He opened a little door that led out onto an oriel running round part of the building.